Local poet, writer, and educator Sarah Giragosian announces her latest book of poetry, Mother Octopus, is now available from Middle Creek Press.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). Her poetry collection Mother Octopus, co-winner of the 2023 Halcyon Prize, is forthcoming from Middle Creek Press. In 2023, the University of Akron Press released her co-edited craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems. Her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Terrain.org, among others. She teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry and English at the University at Albany-SUNY.
Her scholarly essays have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including ISLE, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, Association for the Study of Evolutionary Biology and Ethical Behavior in Literature Journal, and TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics. Honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities, a Katharine Bakeless Nason grant to participate in the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writer’s Conference, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and inclusion in the 2016 and 2018 Best of the Net Anthology. She was also named a semi-finalist in the “Discovery”/ Boston Review Poetry Contest (judged by Timothy Donnelly, Gregory Pardlo, Eileen Myles, Bruce Smith, and Juan Felipe Herrera).
Mother Octopus is animated by eco-poems that raise questions about the nature of human and animal appetites and the increasing levels of consumption that threaten the environment, while also exploring queer forms of intimacy and resilience in the Anthropocene. Giragosian’s poems inquire into the forces and agencies (ie: gut flora, bacteria, microorganisms) that impact animals and human animals in complex ways not always on our personal level of consciousness. In an era in which the global pandemic is shaping discourse about animals and environment (often in reductive ways), Mother Octopus deepens the conversation about how the crisis derives from humanity’s problematic relationships to animals and the environment, as well as the indiscriminate omnivorism that characterizes our age. Elegiac and yet critical of false consolation, Mother Octopus delves into the anxieties, violence, and pleasures of consumption (corporeal, economic, and societal) and its impacts on peoples, animals and environments.
Mother Octopus is available for $18 on Amazon and from Middle Creek Press.
